Case Mered, the testimony of the Coast Guard: "The trafficker was in Dubai last summer"
During the hearing of the trial against the "General" of the traffickers, a Coast Guard officer reported new elements that could confirm the hypothesis of the person's exchange. The young man currently held in Palermo, in fact, has always declared his innocence. And to test it there are also the DNA examination and a sound test on the intercepted phone calls of the real trafficker
The man currently detained in the "Pagliarelli" prison in Palermo and under trial accusing him of being a trafficker of human beings
"By the summer of 2016, Medhanie was in Dubai." This was reported on Friday during a hearing in front of the Court of Assise of Palermo, assembled in the Ucciardone bunker hall, sergeant Samuel Sasso of the Special Operation Center of the Harbor Master's Office. To provide information to Italian inquisitors (who were investigating a Roman cell dedicated to facilitating illegal immigration on the mandate of the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office) was the Dutch police. Sasso was called to testify during the trial against the alleged trafficker of men Medhanie Yedhego Mered, arrested in Khartoum (Sudan) in May 2016. A trial involving suspicion of a person's exchange: the man detained in the prison "Pagliarelli "In Palermo, in fact, has stated since the arrest of Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe. And to be totally foreign to the trafficking business.
The photograph that would portray the true trafficker inside a Dubai bar in the summer 2016 adds a further clue to this complicated story. Coast Guard men are explaining - through the material collected during thousands of phone tapping - that Medhanie Yedhego Mered was planning to invest the money earned with trafficking in human beings in the UAE. To get an idea of what his trafficker was doing, just think that only in the period between July and September 2014 and only with regard to payments arrived from Italy, the trafficker has collected about $ 60,000.
From the Sasso deposition, other elements related to the age of the trafficker (34-35 years) and his physical appearance were re-established by the Coast Guard men through an impressive number of telephone intercepts. The use of telephone tapping and the analysis of the various Facebook profiles of the alleged trafficker allowed to reconstruct the trafficker's family network: his brother, sister, wife (Lidya Tesfu, living in Sweden with her son) and l 'lover .
The trafficker's brother, Mehrawi, a political refugee in Holland, was questioned by Dutch police and the minutes of that interrogation, sent to Coast Guard men along with a series of photographs. In addition to what the trafficker would look like in Dubai in the summer of 2016, there are others extracted from Mehrawi's phone, portraying his brother.
Medhanie Yedhego Mered, nicknamed the "General", is considered to be one of the chief human traffickers along the route linking Libya to Europe. In May 2016, a Sudanese police operation (in conjunction with the National Crime Agency) led to the arrest of a man named Medhanie Yedhego Mered, who was subsequently handed over to the Italian police. But since his arrival in Italy, the young arrested declared himself to be Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe and to be a simple pastor, totally out of touch with the trafficking business. But for Palermo investigators, this name would be just one of the many aliases used by the trafficker.
In these long months of trial, the thesis of person exchange has accumulated an increasing number of evidence. Among the most recent and most important, there is
the outcome of the DNA examination under which Meaza Zerai Weldai, an elderly Eritrean woman who claimed to be the mother of the boy detained in Palermo, was subjected to. "Ms. Meaza Zerai Weldai is the biological mother of Medhanie Tesfamariam Behre. The probability of maternity is 99.9999999998%, "says technical counseling report presented by advocate lawyer Michele Calantropo.
On November 16th, however, the Public Prosecutor's Office and the defense were confronted with what the Pm in Palermo represents the "queen trial": the phonetic recognition of the defendant. For defense, "none of the anonymous voices found in the intercepts tested is compatible with the sound test issued by the defendant with a confidence level of 99%," Milko Grimaldi, Forensic Phoning and Director of the Interdisciplinary Language Research Center of the University of Salento. The opinion of the expert charged by the Procuratorate Marco Zonaro is more vague: "I can not confirm that he is, but I can not even exclude it with certainty."
--Software translation--
